24 Apr 2019

Many people believe William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens were the best British writers of all times.

  Their books were about life, love, death, revenge, grief, sorrow, murder, magic, mysteries and talismans.

They wrote plays such as Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, A Tale of Two Cities, Barnaby Rudge and David Copperfield.

Botswana has also produced one of its best writers in Nsununguli Mbo, whose books are fiction based on greed, betrayal, lying, trusting strangers, dishonesty, corruption and many more.

They are fiction with a mixture of comedy, suspense/thriller and crime and a bit of romance. Unlike Shakespeare who was born a playwright, poet and actor, Mbo is a psychiatrist, who holds three degrees in medicine, surgery and obstetrics.

When and where did he acquire the skills for writing? His secret was being a bookworm. 

“Being a library prefect and a bookworm at the same time, I devoured Pacesetters as well as the Africa Writer’s Series and other novels. It was during those times that I developed a liking for writing,” he added.

Narrating his journey into writing, Mbo said he started writing story after story and that none of them ever got finished because he would develop a new idea while working on one manuscript.

Whilst many children of his age were busy writing love letters to their female peers, Mbo drafted titles of the books he wanted to write.

He explained that those were the days when writing love letters to crushes at such a young age was normal. So, one day while he was attending a lesson the teacher sneaked up on him and found him scribbling something under the desk, and the teacher immediately decided it was a love letter he was writing.

“She calmly asked me to hand over the notebook I had been busy with. She went to the front of the class and prepared herself to read what she presumed to be a love letter to the whole class. But then, she froze before saying, “So, you want to start selling us books, huh?” 

Also during his education abroad, Mbo’s locum work involved a lot of flying and instead of the free wine on the aeroplane, he would opt for his little notebook and started typing away a novel inspired by the peacefulness of being up there. Most of his other four books were written from nine hundred and five metres above the ground.

His passion for writing was also associated with his naughtiness. While doing Form Five, he got kicked out of all Setswana lessons for the whole semester due to the peer pressure from the boys who liked sitting at the back of the classroom and jeering at others. He tore off a test paper in which he had gotten a zero for the first time ever in his life.

During the six months of not doing Setswana, he would sit by the lockers and devour novel after novel while during his spare time he would try hard to catch up on the Setswana lessons he was not allowed into.

Luckily enough he got an ‘A+’ in Setswana in his BGCSE results and was also among the pupils who topped in English literature in the whole country as well.  He enjoyed books by Shakespeare, John Grisham, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe, among others.

While doing Form Four, he wrote a novel which was accepted by one of the educational material publishing houses. After some time, he got feedback from the publisher with recommendations. He decided he would work on that at a later stage.

Mbo is the author of 10 novels and has thus far self-published Wrong turn, A crisis of the heart, The five litre container, The basketball school, The missing corpse, The village doctor, The other four, The traditional hospital, The convert, The stolen souls and The disappearing horses.

Some of them are set in the fictional village of Tsebeyatonki where things tend to go wrong and in the fictional Lentsweng town as well as other fictional and real places.

He said as a psychiatrist he should be observant and study the body language of the patient and people surrounding oneself.  Perhaps this is the reason why his parents named him Nsununguli, which is a Kalanga name meaning ‘the liberator,’ and in this case, the liberator of mind through writing.

“Being a psychiatrist gives me an idea of what might be going on inside someone’s mind hence my books are all based on the mindset. In them, I describe the characters’ emotions on what they had experienced in their lifetime,” he added.

He said although writing was a passion but at the same time hard to do, hard to sell and hard to find readers if one sold any novel, and hard to earn a living wage off even if one finds readers. Therefore, he said, writing was work and it deserved pay.

“Like I said earlier, I don’t expect to make money from writing hence I don’t actively do much marketing. Mbo does have a Facebook fan page, which was where he did most of his advertising and marketing, and the page had resulted in some sales and attracted curiosity and positive attention which resulted in more exposure.

“I doubt if I’ll ever stop writing. I do take long breaks of course, but when I’m in the right environment, I go into a routine of writing. I get inspired by quiet places with natural beauty,” he said.

At some point in life, the Mbalambi born man lost interest in writing, at least for a while when he was doing his Tirelo Sechaba at Lehututu in Kgalagadi north. This was the time when he was attached to work at a clinic and the locals called him ‘nyaka,’ meaning (doctor).

As time went on, the cultural difference he experienced during his one-year stay inspired him to handwrite a memoir. Unfortunately, he lost contact with the memoir as well as the manuscript that had the publisher’s recommendations.

Just like Pablo Picasso who once hinted that when inspiration exists, it has to find you working, Mbo got the inspiration to write from pretty much anything depending on his mood, but especially by undisturbed nature. 

His travel experiences and interaction with people from various cultural backgrounds and socio-economic classes motivated him to write.

All his books are recommended for mature readers and are available at Exclusive Books at Airport Junction Mall, Gaborone, and also via major online book retailers.

He is currently working on yet another manuscript. ENDS